


as the days ahead become behind

by fuckener



Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Gen, Hurt/Comfort, M/M, Post-Avengers: Infinity War Part 1 (Movie)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-05-30
Updated: 2018-05-30
Packaged: 2019-05-15 21:54:16
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,244
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14798660
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/fuckener/pseuds/fuckener
Summary: Bucky and Sam and the aftermath.





	as the days ahead become behind

**Author's Note:**

> this fic is a sort-of sequel to another story, but you don’t have to have read that first

“What the hell happened?” Sam asks, and he gives Bucky a look that’s begging for a different answer than the truth.

He’s holding Steve’s shield with his knuckles popped around it. Bucky has been around Sam enough to know he doesn’t scare easy, doesn’t panic, doesn’t do whatever this is. 

It means that it’s real.

In his head he sees Steve, gray-faced and disintegrating, reaching out for him; Steve calling out his name and falling to the ground in ashes.

He swallows. Turns away. Croaks, “He’s gone.” And that’s it.

-

There are ugly patches in the landscape every time Bucky looks around Wakanda - scorched earth, ruined structures, dead bodies - things didn’t exist before they arrived, scars they left on a beautiful country. 

He hopes they close their borders again. He hopes they put up the barrier and never let anyone else through. 

The last Avengers left huddle around a table in a too-big Wakandan boardroom while Bucky stands off to the side and looks out the window, half-listening. His brain is static. The others have a conversation about how to deal with what happened, talk about how it’s their fault that Wakanda suffered the brunt of everything, their fault that half of the people who survived the attack ended up dead in the end, anyway. 

He only pays attention when Okoye walks in. Everyone goes quiet. 

She looks out the window instead of at any of them when she says, “There is nothing you can do for us here.”

Please, she means. Leave. 

Part of Bucky, the part that’s always scared, wants to be put in that cryogenic freezer for whatever life he’s got left. They’d let him, he thinks. Shuri, the princess - the queen - she liked him. She used to laugh when she was fitting him for his new arm and say, “What is it with moody white boys and not washing your hair?” and he’d laugh too, because he hadn’t been made fun of enough in the past seventy years and it felt good, felt human.

He doesn’t ask. Shuri gives them an airship to leave on the next day.

“I built this,” she tells him quietly, looking up at the carrier as the others are climbing in. She looks tiny beside to it, even in her gown and tall headdress. 

“I’m sorry,” Bucky says. It’s all he can think to say.

Shuri’s mouth goes tight, and then she turns to him with a softer look on her face, a sad kind of smile, and Bucky realises looking at her that he’s going miss this place and the brief respite he had here.

“I thought you might ask to stay,” she says, quietly. Maybe she thinks he doesn’t want the others to hear.

He shrugs. Sam walks up the ramp into the carrier and they catch eyes as he goes - they keep doing that, sharing looks with each other in passing. There’s an odd solidarity in grief like this, he notices. He got so used to being alone with everything.

“I didn’t think you’d want to keep outsiders around here,” he explains. That’s what he is in Wakanda and that’s what he’ll be when he climbs aboard that jet: the odd man out. He knows living around the Avengers will be a infinitely harder than living with the Wakandans was and knows that he is not prepared for it, and he adds, quietly, “I wouldn’t.”

There are far less people puttering around the hangar than there were when he arrived here, and they all have similar expressions on their faces, an exhausted kind of sadness. Bucky looks at them all and feels culpable, and then a warm hand touches his good arm.

“The border will stay open.” Shuri gives him a hard, meaningful look, and says, “The world doesn’t need to get any smaller than it already is.”

-

The Avengers regroup in a compound in New York. Bucky is there because he doesn’t know where else to go and nobody tells him to leave.

They talk about what to do next. About relief aid and the government and how some guy called Clint isn’t doing so well, and that’s the Black Widow’s first priority right now. 

“I’m done,” she says, holding up her hands, and she looks it too. They all do.

Especially Iron Man, who sits in a sunken heap in one of the chairs, staring wide-eyed at and saying nothing. He doesn’t acknowledge or even seem to notice the fact Bucky is standing at the back, against a wall, watching him intently. 

Bucky tries to stop himself, but can’t: his mind has been programmed to study his enemies closely and has proved incapable of listening to reason when he needs it to. Even when he focuses on something else, someone else, Iron Man’s movements in the corner of his eye catch his attention attention. Anything he says or mutters is amplified above all other sound.

When they arrived and Sam told him about Steve, Iron Man had said, “Jesus, _no_ ,” his voice cracking. He’d sat with his head in his hands for a long time, until his friend touched his knee, and then he’d sat up, looked at him, and said in a voice so quiet that Bucky knew nobody else was meant to hear it, “Thank god - thank _god_ you came back.”

Bucky knows from studying him like this that Iron Man - that Tony is a good man. He knows that he likes Tony as a person. After everything that came before it, it’s a sad conclusion to come to.

They talk for a while about what to do next. Some of it he follows, some of it he doesn’t. Sam gets a call and cuts off mid-sentence to leave the room and take it. At some point Thor says, softly, “If this was your limit - if this is where you draw the line, it’s alright. Nobody will think less of anyone who wants to leave. There’s nothing more that can be asked of you, my brave friends.”

After that the conversation ends. They start to filter out, all in separate directions, towards different places. All of them seem to have some idea of what to do next. Bucky stares out of the window.

“How did Cap manage having the reset button hit on his life like that when he came out of the ice,” Tony asks, and it takes a moment for Bucky to realise, even in the empty room they’re left in, that he’s talking to him.

He doesn’t know how to respond. He looks at Tony and Tony looks at the coffee table, his head propped up on his hand, bruised and bandaged all over.

Everything that happened before is suddenly still and dead between them. Bucky can feel it - the kind of understanding that can only be borne out of a mutually devastating tragedy. Not forgiveness, but something. 

“I should have asked him,” Bucky says.

Tony looks at him then, briefly, and then away again. The humourless smile on his face disappears, and sighing, he gets up off the seat. 

“Where’s the star spangled man with a plan when you need him, huh,” he says on his way out. 

-

Bucky makes to leave with no destination in mind, unthinking and numb, but on his way out of the compound someone calls out his name from behind. If it had been anyone else’s voice he doesn’t think he would have stopped.

He turns. Sam is on the staircase landing with a suitcase and two backpacks at his feet, frowning down at him.

“Where are you going?” he asks.

Bucky tries to picture a map of the world but every country comes to him with a corresponding hazy memory of something horrible that happened there - something that he did, something that was done to him, something that can’t be undone.

“I don’t know,” he answers, lips curled. 

Sam hefts the luggage down the stairs and mumbles, “Yeah, I figured you’d say that.”

He stops the suitcase between them and straightens again, looking Bucky dead in the eye. It’s jarring. Nobody’s looked at him properly since they got here. 

“I thought it was obvious,” Sam says. “You’re coming with me.”

Bucky blinks, surprised. It takes a moment for him to process it, to understand why Sam would suggest this, and it the realisation hits him dully: Steve didn’t have much to leave behind, except his obligations. All Sam inherited from him is Bucky.

He shakes his head. “You don’t have to do that, Wilson. I can look after myself.”

“No,” Sam says, quietly, “you can’t.”

It’s one of those times where Bucky is struck by how much Sam is like Steve, how much Sam reminds him of himself back when he was a different kind of man. If they’d known each other back then they would have gotten along so much better than they do now. Bucky wouldn’t be afraid to know him better.

Sam sighs.

“Listen. If you have nowhere to go, you may as well come with me.” His eyes fix on something past Bucky’s shoulder when he adds, shrugging, “I don’t have many friends left, either.”

Bucky had watched Sam during the Avengers’ meeting too, and was struck by just how lonely he looked in the middle of them all without Steve beside him. They’d caught eyes while the others were talking, and Bucky had understood the look they'd shared: a resigned acceptance that neither of them belonged in this place, that they had both lost what had been keeping them anchored to it.

Wordlessly, he slings the other backpack over his shoulder and follows Sam out the door.

-

They drive to Washington. 

The last time they were in a car together Sam had put the radio on and laughed at Steve for asking if a new song that was playing was by Michael Jackson. (Bucky had said, “Michael Jackson died.” Sam had turned to him, surprised, burst out laughing again and said, “God, even _he_ knows, man,” and Steve had looked between them both in the rearview mirror, grinning.)

This time they go in silence. Bucky is exhausted but knows he wouldn’t be able to sleep if he tried and beside him, Sam looks like he feels the same. His hands are all bones around the wheel and the set of his mouth is off. 

Maybe Bucky should say something. Maybe he should ask where exactly they’re going, what they’re doing, why Sam is holding the wheel so tightly. Why he keeps glancing at his phone in the cup-holder and taking long, unsteady breaths.

He opens his mouth, and Sam’s phone starts ringing before he can say anything.It’s probably for the best, he thinks. 

Sam pulls over on the side of the interstate as soon as he can, grabbing his phone and getting out of the car. Bucky watches him through the driver’s mirror as he takes the call - Sam has his back to it, his head lowered, a hand on his hip. All Bucky can hear is the sound of cars passing them by.

After a moment Sam hangs up, rubs the back of his neck, and then he just stands there. 

When he climbs back in a few moments later, Bucky stares resolutely out of his own window.

“You superspies are all nosy as fuck,” Sam says under his breath, turning his keys in the ignition. Bucky smiles.

-

They stop at the next gas station they pass. Sam nods his head at it.

“You want anything?”

Bucky thinks. “A drink, maybe.”

Sam nods and gets out. He comes back with a huge pack of nappies under one arm and a bottle of iced tea, which Bucky’s never tasted before.

“It’s good,” Sam assures him when he sees him eyeing the bottle. He shoves the nappies into the backseat and then starts the car again. “Trust me.”

Bucky takes a drink - it’s not bad.

“I prefer coke,” he says. He still kind of remembers how to be funny sometimes.

Sam starts driving, mouth quirked. He grabs the bottle off of Bucky, says with faux apology, “Damn, that’s too bad,” and takes a mouthful. 

-

Bucky knows where Sam lives because he staked it out a couple of times after DC. Steve lived with him for a bit before they started looking for Bucky, but of course, Bucky left before they could find him. Now that he’s more himself again, it’s unthinkable that there was a time when he didn’t want Steve’s help, that there was time they could have spent together, and didn’t. 

Sam pulls into the driveway and turns off the ignition, and for a moment they just sit in front of the house in silence. Bucky can’t read him sometimes - has trouble with people who know how to hide what they’re feeling as well as Sam does - but it’s almost uncomfortably easy then. Sam’s eyes are red and shadowed and his mouth pulls down at the corners, and he looks tired and miserable and Bucky, turning away, doesn’t feel like he should see him like that.

Then Sam holds up a finger.

“I have one house rule,” he says. “Don’t, under any circumstances, use my ensuite.”

Bucky’s mouth twitches. “I’ll try to keep that in mind.”

“You’ll _try_ , huh,” Sam says, opening his door.

The house is different inside than Bucky pictured it. It suits Sam - a warm, well lived-in space. Bucky feels alien standing in it. He looks down at his metal hand on the head of the sofa and knows, immediately and with some guilt, that he will not be staying here long.

While Sam moves his luggage in his bedroom, he isn’t sure what to do with himself except look around the living room, not too closely, but the amount a normal person would. It’s harder than he wants it to be to shut off the part of his brain that’s been trained to soak in information, regardless of social boundaries.

There are photographs everywhere, books and DVDs and pieces of art, and Bucky comes to the unsettling realisation that Sam had a life here that’s so much realer than he’d ever considered. He has family and friends, that he lives a parallel life in an entirely different world to the one he left behind in New York.

Bucky looks at the carefully arranged photographs on the mantle, a dozen smiling faces looking back at him, and feels stupid for not having realised sooner that Sam must have lost more than one person in the snap. 

He sits on the sofa, on the edge of the cushion, and doesn’t notice that Sam is back into the room until he speaks.

“Hey.” Sam gestures over his shoulder. “I’ll show you the guest room. You should get some sleep.”

He’s still got his coat on and his keys in his hand. Bucky doesn’t think either of them have slept since it happened.

“Shouldn’t you?” he asks.

Sam’s mouth quirks but it isn’t really a smile. “There’s something else I’ve gotta do first.”

Bucky nods and doesn’t push it.

He follows Sam to a bedroom down the hallway. Inside, Bucky can recognise traces of Steve everywhere - the shoes beside the dresser, the comb on the bedside table, the blue shirt hanging on the back of the door. Neither of them say anything about it.

“Thanks,” Bucky says quietly. Sam faces the hallway and nods.

His phone starts ringing again and he steps out. Bucky hears him saying, “Ten minutes, ma, don’t worry about it,” and then the front door shutting behind him.

He sits on the bed and debates with himself on what to do now. He thinks Sam would understood if he left, that he’d probably be as relieved as he’d be annoyed by it, but in the end exhaustion wins out.

-

“Can you only sleep for ridiculously long periods of time or something?” Sam asks when Bucky comes into the living room rubbing his eyes. He doesn’t look up from his paper. The front page reads **THE AFTERMATH OF THE ‘SNAP’: A WORLD IN TURMOIL**. 

Bucky doesn’t know what day it is. Hewishes he was still asleep.

“How long was I out?” 

“Three days.” Sam turns a page. He looks a little better than he did before. “There’s food in the fridge.”

Bucky nods and goes into the kitchen, where he finds fifteen tupperware boxes of various meals stacked on top of each other in the refrigerator. He takes five at random, heats them up in the microwave and sits awkwardly at the dining table, eating them alone.

Sam comes and leans against the doorway, snorting when he sees the amount of food Bucky has laid in front of him. His voice is so soft that Bucky knows he isn’t talking about him when he says, “There’s that supersoldier appetite,”.

“Sorry.” Bucky leans back from the table and wipes his mouth on the back of his hand. “I forget this isn’t - normal.”

“It wasn’t a complaint,” Sam says, hands raised. “God knows I’m not getting through that amount of food without substantial help.”

Bucky smiles and then belatedly resumes eating.

“I gotta head out again for a little while,” Sam says, putting his hands in his pockets. His keys jingle.

Bucky chews slowly and nods. He looks down at his chilli when he asks, “Is everything okay?”

He doesn’t know how to say the question he really wants to ask. Doesn’t think he has the right to ask it.

Sam is quiet for a moment. Bucky hears him taking in a long breath, hears the effort he makes to be silent about it.

“My mom is looking after my sister’s kids,” Sam says. “I’m - helping out. Trying to, anyway.”

In his head Bucky sees a framed picture on Sam’s mantle of a pretty woman with his smile, a little girl in one arm and a baby in the other, sitting on the same seat Bucky is on right now.

He presses his mouth together. “I’m sorry.”

“Yeah,” Sam says quietly, “me too.” 

And after another moment, he leaves. The front door shuts. Bucky hears his car pulling out of the drive and driving off, and then - nothing.

He eats, cleans up after himself, and then he doesn’t know what to do. He should head out soon, he thinks, leave Sam to his life instead of taking up more space in it. 

He takes a shower and stays in under the water until his fingertips are wrinkled, until he suddenly feels alone in there in such an absolute way he can’t breathe around it and has to fumble with the knobs to get it off. Then he stands in the cold air, eyes shut, inhaling and exhaling and inhaling and even his feelings are directionless. Grief grips him by the throat and holds him in place. 

There’s nothing he could have done and nothing he can do now. Steve is dead.

Clothes. He needs new clothes. Can’t stand the thought of taking any of the ones in the guest room. Thinks Sam would hate him more for that than for stealing some of his own. 

It’s okay because he’s leaving, he thinks.

He opens Sam’s bedroom door and not look around. He tries to be as clinical about it as possible, taking the first things he finds that look big enough to fit him from the dresser and leaving everything looking neat and untouched behind him. Sam will know, anyway.

He pulls the clothes on, staring resolutely down at himself as he does. It’s only as he’s shutting the door behind himself that his eyes catch the reflection of something on Sam’s desk, and he has to stop. 

Without thinking he goes back in. There, on the desk - Steve’s shields. Both of them. The one from Wakanda and the one from before. Before.

Bucky reaches out. He puts his hand to the scratches across the metal, and is hit by such a full-bodied wave of pain he has to shut his eyes shut against it.

When he opens them again, he sees a framed photograph next to the shields, sees Sam’s sister in graduation robes and Sam next to her, both of them beaming. Hanging over the side of the frame are dog-tags that say RILEY **.**

I should not be here, he thinks.

He takes his hand away, reprimanded, and walks out of the room, out of the house. Has to be anywhere, anywhere but here. Has to be away from Steve’s old things, away from Sam and his private cemetery Bucky had no right being in. 

The minute he’s off of Sam’s lawn, he runs so fast he barely lets himself breathe. House after house flies by in his peripheral view. No matter how far he goes there is nobody, nobody else around. 

Soon after, his chest starts to feel too tight to fit his lungs, his heart. He doesn’t think his legs can keep steady for much longer - his body is _failing_ , the one thing he’s always been able to depend on despite it all, the one thing that’s always worked _._

He stumbles over his own feet, and it’s so terrifying that it knocks the wind out of him and he has to stop.

Around him, the world is dizzy and indistinct. He holds onto his knees to stay upright, tries to breathe. Tries to remember how to think. Then he drops down on the lawn of a house with no lights on, gasping for air. 

He looks, and he can still see Sam’s house in the distance. _Jesus_ , he thinks, the one word that rises above the swell of noise in his brain.

He doesn’t know how long he sits there waiting until he feels ready to stand up again. Long enough to feel like the time might never come. 

After the sun starts going down, a car pulls up in front of him. He knows it must Sam, on his way back home.

Sam steps out of the car, looks at him, and sighs. Bucky half-expects him to get back in and keep driving, half-wants him to, but then Sam shuts the door and walks over, sitting down next to him on the grass. He stares up at the sky, his mouth a hard line.

After a moment, he puts a hand on Bucky’s shoulder. Bucky is tense under his touch until Sam tells him, quietly, “I didn’t do so great today either.” 

-

There’s more food in the fridge the next morning, all neatly labelled in handwriting that doesn’t belong to Sam. Bucky eats some of it. Cleans up after himself. Examines the huge plastic bag of clothes on the couch with a note stuck to it. This one is in Sam’s handwriting: _yours if you want them._ The clothes are bigger than Sam’s are, fit him better.

At 2PM, Sam’s car is still in the driveway and Bucky still hasn’t heard a sound coming from his bedroom. He doesn’t know enough about social conventions to know what to do in this situation, or if something needs to be done at all. He just knows it’s unlike Sam to sleep in late, unlike an army man. It makes him paranoid, makes his brain work irrationally. 

He thinks going through Sam’s bookcase is less of an invasion of privacy than barging into his bedroom again so he picks something out, sits on the couch, forces his eyes to move across the page, and is hyper-aware of every sound the house makes around him - the foundations creaking, clock ticking, lights buzzing, the total silence from Sam’s bedroom. 

After what starts feeling like too long, there’s movement: Sam’s bedroom door opens with a whine.

His feet shuffle across the hallway floor. He stops, and Bucky feels eyes on the back of his head for a moment, then he shuffles off again. In the kitchen, the refrigerator opens and shuts l. Cutlery clinks together, orange juice pours. Sam is breathing, soft and steady. A knot in Bucky’s chest unwinds. 

He reads some more with the sound of Sam washing dishes for ambience. When Sam comes into the living room Bucky can’t help thinking that they both look especially bad today, and there’s no real reason for it.

After yesterday, he feels like he should say something. He assumes that Sam will first - that he’ll make a joke about how he’s glad Bucky isn’t wearing his clothes anymore or comment on his choice of reading material, something. 

Sam just sits on the one-seater couch on Bucky’s far left. 

“You mind if I turn on the TV?” he asks, looking down at the controller.

Bucky pauses. He isn’t used to being asked questions with easy answers. “No.”

Sam turns it on and puts on a movie. Bucky thinks they’re both hearing it as white noise in the background, but there’s something oddly calming about it. Watching it is like turning off. It’s not a bad thing.

After an hour, Bucky says, “Thanks for the clothes.”

Sam’s face softens a bit. His mouth quirks just slightly.

“Thanks for not stretching out any more of my good henleys,” he says.

-

Sam keeps disappearing during the day and coming back at night with more tupperware containers of his mom’s leftovers, while Bucky goes through the first two cramped shelves of his bookcase and doesn’t know what else to do with himself. He avoids the guest room when he isn’t sleeping in it, but it doesn’t matter much, and Steve’s ghost follows him from room to room. He still thinks about leaving when Sam’s gone and the house feels quiet around him, the space of it suffocating.

“Hey,” Sam says one morning, around the time he normally heads out. He clears his throat. “My mom and the kids are coming over for dinner.”

Bucky looks at him. Thinks of Sam’s psychology books. Hesitantly, he asks, “Do you want me to leave?”

Sam gives him a confused look, and takes a moment before he responds. He shrugs. “I want you to stay. If you can. But you can leave if you want.”

Part of Bucky wants to leave and part of him wants to stay. None of him knows what to do.

“I haven’t been around kids in a long time,” Bucky says, even though he knows it’s obvious. He looks down into his coffee. He makes it most mornings because he’s up earlier than Sam is and feels guilty for not doing much else. “Or even just...”

Normal people, he wants to say. He isn’t sure if Sam falls under that category or not. Never really has been.

“They won’t hurt you,” Sam says. He’s smiling like it’s a joke, but there’s a sympathetic kind of understanding in his eyes. 

Sam must have been good at his job, Bucky thinks, because normal people aren’t as good at dealing with situations like this, with people like him.

“Okay,” Bucky says. 

He takes a drink of his coffee. Under the dining table, Sam’s knee touches his.

-

An hour later, the front door opens and a woman in her fifties comes in with a baby in her arms a a little girl peeking out from behind her legs. Sam greets them all with a smile, takes the baby out of his mom’s arms, kisses she and his niece on the head.

Bucky sits on the one-seater and feels out of place.

“Ma, Ava,” Sam says, “that’s Bucky.”

Bucky waves. The little girl, Ava, stares at his metal arm. Sam’s mom crosses the room to shake his hand and smile at him. She looks like Sam does, kind and irreparably sad.

“Nice to meet you, Bucky,” she says.

Bucky thinks of the dozens of tupperware containers in the fridge and the dishwasher and says, trying his best to smile, “You too.”

It’s not as bad as he thought it would be. He forgets - everyone is damaged goods these days. 

It’s only now, watching him with his niece and nephew, that Bucky understands why Sam is so quiet when he comes home from his mom’s house at night. He’s so careful to stay positive around them. He blows raspberries into baby Joseph’s neck and tells Ava he likes the cartoon from her backpack, and here, he’ll find an episode for her to watch.

And then goes into the kitchen where his mom is cooking, talking to her in a hushed voice, and leaves Bucky with his niece.

She keeps looking at his arm. He thinks maybe he should leave the room. It would probably be worse if he just took it off, he thinks, but in that moment he badly wants to.

“I like your hand,” Ava says, quietly.

Bucky blinks at her.

“Like Iron Man,” she adds. Her mouth tilts up.

“Thank you,” he says, awkward but sincere. “I like your - shoes.”

She jumps off of the sofa and her shoes start blinking purple. She smiles up at him.

After a little while, Sam calls them both into the kitchen. Bucky goes and finds he and his mom sitting at the dining table with food spread across it, Sam feeding Joseph something from a jar as he squirms in his lap. He is the smallest person Bucky’s seen in a long time.

Sam looks up at Bucky, mouth quirked. “You want a shot?”

Bucky sits down, snorting. “Don’t think I’m ready for that.”

His mom has to call on Ava again before she comes in, frowning and looking at the floor. She sits up at the table and stares at her food while the rest of them eat. Bucky glances around the table and sees that they’re all giving her concerned looks.

“Ava, baby, eat something,” Sam’s mom insists.

Ava is quiet for a moment, and then she drops her fork and turns to Sam, her eyebrows drawn together.

“Where are all the pictures of mom?” she asks.

The expression on Sam’s face shifts, the positive facade slipping to reveal something vulnerable underneath. Bucky knows he took all the photographs of his sister and Steve down. He knows he keeps them in a drawer in his room - hears the sound it makes when he opens it sometimes at night.

Sam looks at his niece like he’s frozen in place. 

“I put them away,” he says, very quietly.

Ava’s face crumples, miserable and angry at once. The plate in front of her makes a clattering noise when she slams a hand on the table, and then asks in a shallow breath, sounding close to tears, “Why would you put her away?”

Sam stares at her, mouth open. 

“Ava,” his mom says. She reaches across the table and touches her granddaughter’s hands. “Eat.”

She stares at Sam for a moment longer and then gives in, deflating sadly. It’s quiet at the table. Bucky looks up at Sam every once in a while and Sam faces Joseph the entire time, feeds him the entire jar of food, and leaves the food on his plate untouched long after his family leaves.

-

Bucky wakes up in the middle of the night, wide awake. He can hear noise from the kitchen - the tap turning, water hitting metal. Deep, shuddering breaths.

He gets up. He’s quiet mostly out of habit than anything else as he moves around the house, and when he reaches the kitchen doorway, he finds Sam hunched over the sink, unaware that he’s being watched. 

Go back, Bucky tells himself, and he should - he should. This is another one of those secret invasions he’s made in this house, another fractured piece of Sam’s grief he wasn’t meant to have seen. 

Sam’s hands are gripping the sink so tight that Bucky can see the outline of his bones in the blue light from the window. His back is trembling. Bucky doesn’t want to leave him in this dark room.

He remembers the crestfallen look on Sam’s face earlier after his niece had gone, how helpless he’d looked when she asked a question he couldn’t answer. For the first time since Bucky has known him, he looked like he had no idea what to do.

It was a long time ago now, but Bucky can still remember what it was like to feel the same fundamental sense of duty when it came to looking after people that he knows is built into Sam - remembers wanting nothing but to take care of his parents, his little sister, of that scrawny little kid from next door he spent the first twenty-five years of his life worrying after. 

He can feel it in him now, bone-deep. He wonders if he’s still capable of looking after someone else and it scares him, just the concept of it, but doesn’t let himself linger on that. He moves forward unthinkingly, reaches out and touches the warm skin of Sam’s back with his good hand.

Sam goes still. 

He rubs Sam’s back, a careful, measured pressure, as gentle as he can be, and hears Sam inhale, quietly. Even if this was the wrong move Bucky thinks he had to do it anyway, try to comfort him somehow. He knows that Sam would have done it for him, that he tries his best to do it in little ways every day. That’s why Bucky’s in this house.

“I think it’s alright not to be good at this,” he says quietly.

Sam’s hands clench on the kitchen island and then go lax. In the blue light from the window in front of him he looks ethereally handsome. Something inside of Bucky shifts and he doesn’t fight it. 

Same turns to face him, a silhouette in the dark. Bucky thinks, maybe he’s fucked this up. Maybe he’s about to get hit or yelled at and left here, maybe he’s just not cut out for being around people anymore.

And then Sam steps closer to him, and doesn’t stop until they’re pressed together and his head is sunk into the curve of Bucky’s shoulder.

Bucky thinks, _oh_ , and nothing else. His heartbeat is quicker than he’s used to, but his brain feels calmed for a moment, quieter than it’s been in such a long, long time. When he reaches up everything changes, briefly - there’s a sudden sense of peace, of understanding, having the weight of Sam in his arms.

-

It’s different, after that. 

Sam’s family comes a few days every week week, and Bucky likes how loud the kids can be and how the baby doesn’t mind filling up any of the silences. Bucky likes that Sam’s mom tells him she can cut his hair if he wants every single time they see each other, and that before she leaves she pats his cheek and tells him earnestly, “Take care of yourself.”

Sam is better around his family, healthier looking the minute they come through the door. He smiles at Bucky sometimes over the crowded little dining table, an appreciative look Bucky doesn’t fully understand. It’s like Sam is thanking him for something that he hasn’t done.

They start going running most mornings. Bucky gets sick of seeing the same walls every day, seeing the same little scattered reminders that something is missing. With Sam alongside him it isn’t like the first time he ran through these streets - it feels purposeful, grounded. His mind can clear a little easier. The first time they went, Sam laughed when Bucky ran so much faster than he did.

Even despite it all, part of Bucky wishes he still wanted to go it alone. Before what happened to Steve he thought it was doable - torturous, but doable - to keep going. These days his mind can still feel like an unlivable space, a pit he knows he’ll never quite climb out of, but in those brief moments of shared understanding where it feels like someone else is be carrying weight of his grief with him, he feels like he isn’t alone with it, like he has something worth being here for.

-

They watch the kids on the Thursday and make sure not to turn on the news or leave the paper lying out before they come. Sam’s mom goes to church and doesn’t argue with Sam for not coming like she does sometimes - it’s best for the kids not to go today, she says. She kisses Sam before she goes, her eyes shiny, and tells him, “But we all have to do whatever we have to do to keep going, baby.” On her way out she pats Bucky on the cheek.

Ava is quiet today. She watches the film Sam puts on and doesn’t make any fuss, doesn’t ask to swing on Bucky’s arm or make a mess of his hair or anything, just wants him to sit beside her. She falls asleep between he and Sam, her head so precariously balanced on Bucky’s stomach that he has to try not to move in case it disturbs her.

Sam sits with Joseph on his knees and points across the room to the picture of his sister he put back on the mantel, his voice cracking on her name.

Bucky reaches across the back of the sofa and touches his shoulder, and Sam’s voice cuts off. The house is quiet around them. After a moment Sam reaches up, puts a hand over his and squeezes.

-

Later, Sam flicks the living room light on at 3AM and finds Bucky sitting up on the sofa and staring at the wall.

He sits down on the arm of the seat, scratches his forearm and looks at the same spot with glazed, bloodshot eyes. His voice is rough when he says, “Is it weird I knew you’d be doing this?”

Bucky’s mouth twitches. He wants to laugh at himself, his predictable sad self. “What else would I be doing.”

Sam doesn’t laugh. “Yeah,” he says quietly, and looks tired that way he lets himself be around Bucky sometimes. “Yeah.”

They sit like that for a while. Bucky closes his eyes and everything he’s been trying not to think of today comes to him at once like an onslaught - he sees the photograph of Sam’s sister, the ones of Steve, Wakanda, news reports from around the world where people crumbled and disappeared. 

He hears the way Steve had said his name. He’d sounded as small as he’d been 70 years ago.

Sam sighs and gets up, heading into the kitchen.

“If neither of us are gonna sleep,” he says, and Bucky hears the fridge open, bottles clinking, “we may as well not-sleep together.”

He leads Bucky outside to the porch swing. After they’ve both sat down he passes Bucky a beer with a knowing kind of half-smile on his face. The alcohol has no real effect, but there’s still some comfort in having a drink together after a shit day.

Three months, neither of them say. Bucky twists the cap off of his bottle and drinks. The moon is small above them. Bucky thinks of aliens and other planets and a universe’s worth of suffering, and swallows.

“I didn’t know whether I should tell you this or not,” Sam says, looking down at his beer instead of at Bucky. “Chances are it’s bullshit, and I didn’t want to -”

He sighs, turns to Bucky.

“Tony’s been looking into it,” he says eventually. These days _it_ only means one thing.

The way he looks at Bucky changes in such a slight way Bucky is surprised by his own faith in his reading of it: Sam is searching for some indication that Bucky’s upset. He’s trying not to show that he’s worried. 

“He thinks that there’s some way he can...” Sam clears his throat and looks away. Drinks.

Bucky doesn’t let himself indulge in the idea. “What do you think?” he asks, quietly. 

“Tony’s... I don’t know.” Sam shrugs, shaking his head. “He’s not in a good place right now. None of us are, but Tony especially isn’t.” He’s quiet. “I don’t know. I don’t think it’s possible.”

“Yeah.” Bucky presses his lips together. “I don’t think so either.”

“I just thought I should tell you, anyway,” Sam says. “I just thought - you know.”

“Yeah. Thanks.”

It’s quiet for a moment. Sam lets out an unsteady breath.

“I miss them,” he says.

Bucky breathes in. Nods.

He doesn’t think he’s ready to talk about it and he doesn’t think Sam is either, but he thinks that’s okay for now. Nobody knew him like us, Bucky thinks, and he takes consolation in it. They both loved Steve enough to keep some parts of him with them, to keep each other.

“You knew I’d come with you,” Bucky says. “After.”

Sam looks at him for a moment and then shrugs. “Honestly? I thought you’d be gone within the first week.” 

“No,” Bucky says, looking at Sam with a sudden realisation. He shakes his head. “You didn’t.”

Sam knocks their shoulders together, one of those small, familiar touch that makes Bucky feel like a person. He smiles, a warmer look than he’s managed the past few months.

Bucky looks down. “Thanks for making me come with you.”

He catches a miniscule movement in Sam’s throat in the corner of his eye - a swallow.

“Nah.” Sam plays with the label on his beer. “Thanks for staying, Buck.” 

Bucky turns to him, and when they meet eyes the back of Bucky’s neck gets hot, and he hasn’t looked at someone like this in a lifetime and it is terrifying.

There are parts of himself he’d like to bring back to life again, things he could do to make his life more sustainable, even if they scare him. Unlearning fear takes a certain amount of trial and error, and he’s afraid right now, he is - hasn’t tried something like this since he was seventy years younger and infinitely more charming - but he thinks it could be worth doing. He’d like to learn how to be a man who acts of his own accord again.

Carefully, he reaches out and puts a hand over the one Sam has on his knee. Sam turns to him and doesn’t even do him the favour of looking surprised by it. He just looks expectant, patient. 

“Is this okay?” Bucky asks. 

It’s not much of a line, not how he would have tried to start this kind of thing as a younger man. Sam smiles at him like he finds it a little funny - a fond kind of look, Bucky thinks. 

“Yeah.” His fingers twitch under Bucky’s. “Yeah, it is.”

They look at each other for a moment, and Bucky catches Sam’s phone screen lighting up with a call as he’s leaning in and he doesn’t stop - this first, he thinks, and everything else after. 

Sam’s breath is warm against his mouth and his long eyelashes are ticklish on his cheek and when Bucky kisses him, he kisses back. Turns his hand palm-up and curls their fingers together.

He can feel the curve of Sam’s mouth against his, the comforting pressure of Sam’s thumb rubbing circles against knuckles, their stubble rasping against each other’s skin. He’d forgotten what it was like to touch someone like this, to be touched like this.

The sky is turning light above them and Sam’s phone screen keeps flashing and in a few hours the kids will be here, and Ava will be swinging on Bucky’s arm and ignoring Sam when he says _quit that_ ; and right now, Bucky sighs against Sam’s mouth, light and unafraid.


End file.
